Features of Disagreement Between Retrieval Effectiveness Measures

Abstract

Many IR effectiveness measures are motivated from intuition, theory, or user studies. In general, most effectiveness measures are well correlated with each other. But, what about where they don't correlate? Which rankings cause measures to disagree? Are these rankings predictable for particular pairs of measures? In this work, we examine how and where metrics disagree, and identify differences that should be considered when selecting metrics for use in evaluating retrieval systems.